And what it says about the Democrat Party.
Wed Sep 16, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“Meet and build relationships with China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders in your chosen area of business,” the invitation on the site of Empire Global Ventures read. “Join us for elite curated experiences with the people who decide the future of China’s tech sector, craft and enforce its regulations, dominate its industries and chart its path forward.”
The only thing more intriguing than the invitation may be Empire Global Ventures whose CEO is also the Vice Chair of the board of J Street and a prominent Democrat donor and fundraiser.
When Governor Andrew Cuomo split up with his celebrity girlfriend after over a decade of shacking up together, media accounts made sure to mention the role of Alexandra Stanto in introducing the formerly happy couple.
As the CEO of Empire Global Ventures, Stanton has come a long way since then. But the name of her company closely echoes Empire State Development, an arm of the New York State government, where Stanton had served as chief of staff from 2006 through 2008.
Stanton had worked for David Patterson, back when he was in the State Senate. Then Eliot Spitzer, New York's megalomaniacal Attorney General picked Patterson, the black and partly blind Senate Majority Leader, as his running mate, to score with voters.
Patterson was never expected to actually take the governor's office, but then Spitzer imploded, after allegations of prostitution and thuggish behavior, and was forced to step down.
Stanton, who had been Patterson’s deputy campaign manager for policy, and Sam Natapoff, her husband, had scored six figure gigs with Empire State Development, with Sam earning the grand title of, “Senior Advisor to the Governor of New York State for International Commerce.” Today, Sam is the president of Empire Global Ventures and writes editorials attacking President Trump over his work to help Americans resist China’s abusive trade policies.
Stanton and her husband had been pumping sizable amounts of money into Paterson and Cuomo's war chests. Stanton alone had donated $10,000 to both Paterson and Cuomo. But Stanton’s fundraising soon went national with an Obama fundraiser running as much as $20,000 a ticket. And Obama named Stanton a general trustee of the Kennedy Center.
The money has kept on rolling out with Stanton donating thousands to Mayor Bill de Blasio and scoring an $8,000 per month consulting job for City Hall.
By then, Stanton had become the vice chair of J Street: a key anti-Israel lobby group.
Alexandra Stanton has spent the last 12 years serving as Vice Chair of the anti-Israel group originally funded by George Soros and has, in media accounts, been dubbed a “Jewish leader.”
Alexandra is the granddaughter of Hellenic Lines shipping tycoon Pericles Callimanopulos. The Greek tycoon’s funeral service was held at the Greek Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Manhattan.
Pericles' daughter and Alexandra's mother, Domna Stanton, a feminist academic who is a longtime board member of Human Rights Watch and had a prominent role at Planned Parenthood, was named by De Blasio as one of New York City’s human rights commissioners.
Domna and her husband Frank, a successful entrepreneur who had made his mark helping his brother Arthur import the Volkswagen Beetle to America and trying to launch an early VCR, showed up in Tom Wolfe's famously mocking profile of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther party.
The Stanton family has connections by marriage to socialites from New York to D.C. and Domna’s Hamptons garden parties are required attendance for celebrities and the smart set.
Alexandra Stanton has kept up the tradition with cocktail parties attended by none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was on the host committee for Hillary Clinton’s million dollar fundraiser for Bill de Blasio, and, more recently, she took part in a Joe Biden fundraiser.
When Pelosi spoke at the anti-Israel J Street’s gala, she thanked Stanton by name.
And when Obama descended into ugly antisemitic attacks against Jewish opponents of the Iran Deal, Alexandra Stanton was there to claim that he “has a right to combat what he thinks are campaigns against him laden with non-facts and offensive statements.”
But Alexandra has a lot of irons in the fire besides campaigning against the Jewish State.
These days, Stanton has also been marketing Little Lives PPE face shields for children, scoring a FOX profile, who described the politically connected Democrat, as a "mom". The Wall Street Journal mentioned Stanton's face shields for children in its article on reopening schools alongside a quote from Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
The American Federation of Teachers, the country's largest network of Democrat teachers' unions, had its PPE purchases facilitated by Stanton and Empire Global Ventures.
Randi Weingarten, the AFT's head, who recently faced criticism for claiming that it's not safe for teachers to go back to school even while attending Al Sharpton's 50,000 strong rally in D.C., was described as knowing "people at Empire Global Ventures, a business development firm with experience in China, where much of the world’s PPE is manufactured."
This wasn't the only strange intersection between Empire, Democrats, and the coronavirus.
The sister-in-law of Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor and Governor Cuomo's brother, works for Empire Global Ventures, and has been touting hypochlorous acid from Y2X Life Sciences as an answer to the coronavirus. Cuomo's sister-in-law claimed that spraying hypochlorous acid could keep businesses safe from the virus. Alexandra Stanton and her husband are listed as Y2X Life Sciences advisers, along with Matt Kennedy, RFK’s grandson and Joe Kennedy III’s brother, who sits on the boards of Kennedy institutions, and had held down various positions in the Obama administration, along with Dick Gephardt, the former Democrat House Majority Leader.
In July, a job posting for Empire Global Ventures described it as a medical products company.
What does Empire Global Ventures actually do and whom does it know in China?
An invitation on the company's site offers the opportunity to meet with "China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders" and "China’s key decision makers".
Who are these senior government officials and how does Empire have access to them?
These are all questions that the media might be asking considering Alexandra Stanton’s long history of access to top Democrat officials, including Obama and Biden, the large checks, and Stanton’s key role at J Street, a domestic group whose funding came from George Soros and, allegedly, Bill Benter, a gambler operating out of Hong Kong. They choose not to ask them.
Alexandra Stanton’s career shows why people join the Democrats, not because they want a fairer world, but because family and political connections pave the path to success, not for the poor, but for wealthy families that are already exceedingly well connected in that world.
The granddaughter of a Greek shipping tycoon became a Democrat operative and fundraiser (and Jewish leader), and while her company claims close access to the officials of a foreign government, she has a powerful position in a foreign policy lobby giving her access to Biden.
Considering Biden’s own longstanding and problematic connections to China, and the role that the Communist dictatorship is allegedly playing in boosting his campaign, this is troubling.
It’s a good thing that the media isn’t interested in asking any tough questions.
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China Wins if Biden Wins
Biden’s disturbing record of pro-China bias.
Mon Sep 14, 2020
Joseph Klein
23
China will have a great friend in the White House if Joe Biden wins the presidency. At the same time, Joe Biden’s son Hunter will acquire more friends in Beijing anxious to do business with a member of the U.S. president’s immediate family in order to gain access to the Oval Office.
Joe Biden has a long record evidencing his pro-China bias. Thus, it was not a surprise when Biden said last year about China: “They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us." After Biden received backlash for this remark, Biden’s handlers tried to turn him into a hawk on China. But Biden cannot escape his enabling of China’s rise in power while he was in public office, helping China to become the U.S.’s number one national security threat.
As Barack Obama’s vice president and point man on China, Biden cozied up to China’s Communist Party leaders. At the opening of the third session of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue in May 2011, Biden said that “a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.” Biden characterized the relationship with China sought by the Obama-Biden administration as “a cooperative partnership.”
In August 2011 at a U.S.-China business round table held in Beijing, Biden declared that “President Obama and I, we welcome, encourage and see nothing but positive benefits flowing from direct investment in the United States from Chinese businesses and Chinese entities.”
Following meetings between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (then-Vice President) in 2011 and 2012, the Obama-Biden administration agreed to allow Chinese companies access to U.S. capital markets without having to go through the same rigorous inspection of their books by U.S. regulators that is required for U.S. companies. Biden’s idea of a “cooperative partnership” was to help boost the economic power of a “rising China” to further heights by handing Chinese companies an opportunity to cheat on a silver platter.
A “rising China” is a positive development only for China. A “rising China” is a very negative development for the United States. China's rapid economic growth, aided by Biden, has enabled the Chinese Communist regime to build up its military and cyber technology to the point that it has become the greatest single threat to our national security.
China did not become our chief adversary on the global stage overnight. China’s economy took off only after it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. And Joe Biden was in China’s corner every step of the way, beginning with his strong advocacy for China’s membership in the WTO while he was in the Senate.
In July 2000, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on giving permanent normal trade relations status to Communist China, then-Senator Biden asserted as a foregone conclusion that “granting permanent normal trade relations to China has little to do with our national security. It does not increase their access to controlled U.S. technology. It does not increase their access to our markets.” Biden then claimed that bringing the Chinese regime into contact with the international norms of the WTO “is the best way to get China to clean up its act.”
Biden was wrong as usual. The Chinese Communist dictatorship did not clean up its act. It did the opposite. As former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI Kevin R. Brock observed in an article he wrote for The Hill, “China largely has cheated its way to prosperity.” Stealing valuable intellectual property and using deceptive tactics to gain an unfair economic advantage are second nature to the regime and its state-owned companies. The regime's atrocious human rights abuses have gotten much worse.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the growing U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated 3.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2017, including 1.3 million jobs lost since 2008 (the first full year of the Great Recession).” This all took place since China became a member of the World Trade Organization, right under Biden’s nose and with his help while he was a senator, vice president, and Obama’s point man on China.
The most benign explanation for Biden’s pro-China bias is that he is a fool, who is oblivious to China’s growing threat to the U.S.'s position as the world’s preeminent global economic and military superpower.
There is also a more sinister explanation for Biden’s willingness to give China the benefit of the doubt. Joe Biden’s son Hunter reportedly cashed in while his father was the point person on Obama-Biden administration policy towards China.
Peter Schweitzer, a prominent author on government corruption who put together a documentary entitled “Riding the Dragon: Uncovering the Bidens’ Chinese Secrets,” has exposed Hunter Biden’s involvement in questionable deals with Chinese government affiliated entities while his father was vice president. Schweitzer charged that “the Bidens were prepared and willing to make money, even if it damaged our military posture vis-a-vis the Chinese who are our chief rivals on the global stage.”
Hunter Biden was involved with a Chinese-dominated investment firm called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) through a U.S. company named Rosemont Seneca Partners that Hunter had formed in 2009 with Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others. BHR was formed in late 2013 by a merger between the Chinese-government linked firm, Bohai Capital, and Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Around the time of the merger creating BHR, Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two with his father to China. While in China, Hunter helped arrange for Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, to “shake hands” with then-Vice President Joe Biden. Hunter Biden met with Li for reportedly a “social meeting.” The coincident timing of Hunter Biden's sojourn to China with his father, the forming of BHR by Bohai Capital and Rosemont, and the father and son face times with Bohai Capital's CEO is suspicious, to say the least. Moreover, the business license of BHR was approved by China shortly after the Biden trip's conclusion. Through its equity participation in BHR’s business, Hunter's firm stood to make a tidy profit.
Last year, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin focusing on the questionable acquisition of a U.S. automotive technology company, Henniges, by a Chinese aviation company and BHR. Henniges’ technology reportedly has military applications. Grassley expressed concerns over the process by which the Obama-Biden administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved this acquisition.
According to Grassley’s account, “In September 2015, BHR joined with a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to acquire Henniges for $600 million. Because the acquisition gave Chinese companies direct control of Henniges’ anti-vibration technologies, the transaction was reviewed by CFIUS. CFIUS approved the transaction despite reports that in 2007, years before BHR teamed up with AVIC’s subsidiary, AVIC was reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter program. AVIC later reportedly incorporated the stolen data into China’s J-20 and J?31 aircraft.”
Aviation Industry Corporation of China is identified by the Pentagon as one of the Chinese companies “owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with China's government, military, or defense industry." The Obama-Biden administration's approval of the joint acquisition of a U.S. company with military-related technology by an AVIC subsidiary and its partner BHR is highly troubling. Obama’s VP and China point man Joe Biden needs to answer some key questions now as voters consider his candidacy for the U.S. presidency.
For example, what interactions did CFIUS members or their staffs have with Obama, Biden or their staffs on the Henniges transaction? What did Joe Biden know about the joint acquisition of Henniges by BHR (in which his son's firm had an equity interest) and a subsidiary of the Chinese government affiliated AVIC? Did Biden or his staff exert any pressure on CFIUS to approve the Henniges acquisition despite its obvious national security implications? Was the Henniges transaction subject to a national security arrangement? If not, why not?
Joe Biden needs to answer these questions and others now without equivocation concerning the Chinese-related business dealings of Hunter Biden’s firm while Joe Biden was vice president. Otherwise, voters will be entitled to assume the worst about what is likely to lie ahead for U.S.-China relations if Hunter's father Joe Biden is elected president.
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